Gotham Diary:
Home Scary Home
15 December 2014
Whenever I find myself near the living room window, I am startled by the passers-by on the other side of 87th Street, many of whom, like this young man with his device and his mug, are not quite passing by. 87th Street is a side street, not a thoroughfare like 86th, and a great deal of what can only be called loitering takes place on it. Also, the people close enough to be appreciated. From the bedroom upstairs, we could see pedestrians at the northeast corner of First and 87th, by they were distant, indistinguishable creatures, notable only for the occasional sporty umbrella. From the living room down here, it is impossible not be intrigued by the view from what momentarily feels exactly like a box in the theatre.
As for the view inside the apartment, that has undergone a startling change, too: the Great Wall of Books has disappeared. But more about that some other time.
***
I have never been so keenly aware of the biographer’s art as I am while reading Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald. That’s another way of saying that I feel, intensely, the very different stories that might have been told by other, less sympathetic historians; while, at the same time, I sense as never before, the complications of perspective that are encompassed by any life, certainly any interesting one. Lee manages to tell at least two stories herself. One of her Fitzgeralds is a novelist with a glittering academic past, about whom one might say that she did not begin to write books of any kind, much less novels, until she caught the sound that would make her voice distinct from all those that she had encountered as a literary scholar. The other Fitzgerald is a woman beset by domestic adversities that, although all too familiar to working-class women everywhere, took this scion of the materially austere but nonetheless elite Knox family by surprise. Twice in her life, she was evicted by bailiffs (or by the threat of their imminent appearance), and after losing a third home to the Thames — her houseboat in Chelsea Reach sank — she spent over a decade in a council estate. It would be easy to put the entire blame for these catastrophes on her feckless husband, but to do so is to reduce Fitzgerald to a passive, hopelessly helpless female.
Another woman might have reflected upon her life as a woman, coming to maturity when she did, but I suspect that Fitzgerald found this subject not only humiliating but, worse, uninteresting — just as I suspect that it was her lack of interest in the foundations of housekeeping that exposed her to the vagaries of uncertain fortune. I am by no means looking down; my familiarity with the embarrassing irregularities that Lee retails (as delicately as possible) is far more extensive than I care to admit. I certainly took no interest in the foundations of housekeeping when I first set out to keep house. I am still far more concerned about the appealing appearance of a room than I am with its actual cleanliness; and, instead of budgeting, I try to spend as little as possible, an effort that from time to time seems to justify outbursts of irresponsibility. I get better at it, I believe, but at my age this is no sterling accomplishment. I am, moreover, a man: I have been able to choose to take on the duties and cares of keeping house. I have not had to raise children, either; my daughter’s daily care was almost exclusively her mother’s concern shortly after she passed her first birthday. Fitzgerald, as a matter of everyday life, was a “devoted mother.” Her efforts to secure the educations of her three children, all of whom followed her to Oxford, were unceasing. By that very token, however, it is not surprising that all three left home at a tender age. And it is difficult to forgive Fitzgerald the priggish blindness that made her refuse to visit her daughter, Tina, while she was living in Muswell Hill out of wedlock, with the man whom she would marry. Photographs appear to confirm one’s judgment that Penelope Fitzgerald never tried to make a home.
In the world in which Fitzgerald grew up, there were servants and maiden aunts to see to what Hannah Arendt calls, in The Human Condition, the labor of domestic life. Like Arendt, Fitzgerald never seriously considered undertaking this labor, even when money was very tight. Both women would have considered housework a shocking waste of mind, and both contrived to avoid it as doggedly as I avoided studying Latin. I lived to regret the early drilling in Latin, but I don’t think that Arendt or Fitzgerald understood what they had missed on the home front. And I don’t fault them for it: they belonged to the first generation of which intelligent people no longer entertained the notion that the minds of women were inferior. Housework would almost certainly have been the waste of a chance to enjoy parity of intellect. I expect that neither ever doubted that housework ought to be done for servants, and that one ought to try to make enough money to pay them, rather than taking it on themselves.
We still live in a world where loving homes are thought to be maintained, or at least overseen, by selfless women, even though selfless women have all but passed from the face of the earth, along with domestic servants. Housekeeping still looks like a mousetrap to intelligent women; no bait in the world could merit the loss of personal autonomy that engagement with housekeeping seems to require. I know this, because smart women often tell me so, and in whispers, as if the very mention of the subject were dangerous. I know many devoted mothers who are raising children in what seems like an improvised camping ground, rather like living in a fun circus without the dangerous animals or the shady characters. The idea, which certainly reigned chez Fitzgerald, is to grow up and go out into the real world as soon and as successfully as possible. You’re not leaving home if you’ve never had a proper one.
The idea that attachments to people are the only important ones strikes me as naive. We are all needy creatures, and it seems healthier to work out some of this neediness on things — possessions. Home is a possession shared by two or more people and owned by none. We talk about the importance of good homes for children, but good homes are never very precisely described. Men, by and large, don’t know anything about them — but who is to enlighten them? Many of the women — most? — who would dearly love to have a home are too poor to make one, and the men in their lives aren’t ready to help them. As for the smart women, they have “better things to do.”
I hope that it won’t be long before well-educated women stop being afraid of home.